Erin Kissane

Doing uspol info mutual aid at Unbreaking.org. Squinting about knowledge and networks at wreckage/salvage. Previously: COVID Tracking Project + Knight Moz OpenNews + editorial and community in tech and culture orgs.

I want our tools and networks to be better in more ways for more people in more places.

project: https://unbreaking.org
studio/research: https://wrecka.ge
personal site: https://erinkissane.com/
verification: https://erinkissane.com/about

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nprofile1qqsgwu06jxyjv7puf52jcke5cq2h8meulsvgz53t9ymd83ecase2jkcprpmhxue69uhhyetvv9ujumt0d4hhxarj9ecxjmntrualrm

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Last Notes

2026-01-16 22:10:44 UTC

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Too late for this update, but AFL-CIO Minneapolis is endorsing a general strike (or "statewide action") on Jan 23 over ICE/CBP violence.
https://minneapolisunions.org/system/files/2026-01/press_release_-_january_16_2026.pdf
#uspol

2024-11-22 15:27:10 UTC

Good morning! I have thoughts about the internet.
https://www.wrecka.ge/against-the-dark-forest/

2024-11-06 15:37:22 UTC

There is plenty of good advice going around about the big things so here is my small piece: If you’re going to be on social media in the next weeks and months and years, block and mute freely rather than getting into spats and squabbles. Preserve your energy for the work. Keep your powder dry.

2024-10-22 21:54:15 UTC

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(XOXO was an incredibly warm, clued-in, unexpectedly healing place to talk about this, and I'm never going to get over it.)

2024-10-16 23:07:53 UTC

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Do we have a #bloomscrolling equivalent for tree-fruit nerds, btw?

2024-10-09 21:53:08 UTC

I'm going to repost some really nice things people are saying about my XOXO talk, which feels a little out of character but also I want people to see it, so mute me for a but if you hate that?

2024-08-31 22:39:50 UTC

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If it helps to know, Dorsey wasn’t involved behind giving them initial money and getting a board seat in return, was immediately bullied off the platform, had a public tantrum about the fact that they do moderation, and resigned from the board.

2024-08-27 18:50:22 UTC

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I don’t have a solution for this, and it feels obvious when I write it out. But it seems worth grappling with across as well as within our various communities. 🪴

2024-08-27 18:47:21 UTC

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And even if you’re SUPER PURE along one vector, you’re always going to miss some other one someone feels very motivated to discipline you about.
And this must be okay for some people! But I try very hard to live in a state of at least partial uncertainty, because the alternative is a real vulnerability to Going Bad without realizing it. The downside of that stance is that shit just doesn’t roll off. This is true for a lot of us, I think—maybe artists most of all, bc art requires sensitivity.

2024-08-27 18:42:54 UTC

I think one of the hard things about fedi, culturally, is that a whole lot (most??) of us are here because we are refusers of norms. And which norms and which levels of refusal differ.
So even if you’re at the 80th to 99th percentile of resistance to corporate social media OR mainstream party politics OR mainstream journalism OR cars OR the normalization of repeat covid infections, there will always be people popping up to tell you that by not being completely pure, you’re killing everyone.

2024-08-27 16:55:15 UTC

Point of order: “I’m not going to discuss this further” includes the additional meaning “If you keep fucking around in my mentions I will block you.” ✌️

2024-08-26 00:45:24 UTC

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(I can’t wait to post Ed Yong’s talk when it goes up but as he noted, this will all continue as long as the people who make the most money and have the most cultural capital can get along ~fine by having plentiful vaccines, concierge healthcare, easy access to the best treatment, and better underlying health, along with the sick leave denied to others. Still so jarring to witness, though.)

2024-08-26 00:34:19 UTC

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Also I am AWASH in good feelings from the amazing festival but if you reply to this condemning individuals for their bad character I may well put you straight into the sardine can. 🐟 🥫

2024-08-26 00:28:26 UTC

Pretty wild to go from XOXO (where everyone was masked up indoors and many were outdoors) to Powell’s (where no one was) back home to the coast (where our housesitter reports that so many service workers have covid this weekend that some of our bars and cafes can’t staff their shifts).

2024-08-15 02:17:53 UTC

A lot of people tried to warn that if we didn’t comprehensively reform the CDC and hold them accountable for covid failures (testing, data, guidance), the next pandemic was going to be a clusterfuck.
Instead of doing any of that, they moved the deck chairs into slightly different configurations and here we are, blindfolding ourselves and hoping it all works out great.
(This is held over from last week bc I was too angry then to post about it.)
https://www.nytimes.com/2024/08/07/opinion/bird-flu-covid.html
https://media.mas.to/media_attachments/files/112/963/622/303/951/172/original/606d19d2ce5524c7.jpeg

2024-08-13 22:49:42 UTC

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#2 and also THANKS RYAN FOR SHARING THIS IMPORTANT INTEL!

2024-07-27 23:19:33 UTC

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Have youse read The Unaccountability Machine yet? I’m reading down to that slice of my TBT stack. Seems highly relevant.

2024-07-27 19:24:59 UTC

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(My best sense of the reason that isn’t happening is because it’s very hard to raise money without any commitment from the developers to use it in the way the fundraisers intend. So add on all the time required to try to make the politics work and we’re years into the future. I think this is a big part of the reason multiple people keep coming back to the idea of a fork, which I don’t love, but which has teeth.)

2024-07-27 19:20:33 UTC

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Like, a lot of people here really vocally don’t want it bc it doesn’t suit their idea of social media, but that isn’t actually the blocker. I’m very curious about what would happen if a clear constituency did the user research, laid out a proposal for a *fully technically informed set of safety-focused changes*, and raised $250k to fund them. (That’s probably realistically a year+ of focused PT work for a couple of people, given the complexities.)

2024-07-27 19:16:16 UTC

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I kicked the hive about this exact thing last month, and the responses from Masto and AP folks left me with the impression that they’re all open to working on this, but it’s behind the things people asked for loudly two years ago (quote posts)/going to involve significant changes for some combo of Mastodon and the protocol/has no funding/has no clear strategy, just a lot of fighting in GitHub threads.

2024-07-27 03:40:21 UTC

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I’ve written almost a book’s worth of words about that exact thing this year. Just gotta get them into readable format.

2024-07-27 02:01:15 UTC

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I haven’t read that, though I’ve seen a lot of the longevity and sociability research more generally. (My own local community has bought into a program based on similar pop-science principles, and I’m skeptical about how well it’s going to generalize to here, but maybe I’ll be pleasantly surprised.)

2024-07-26 20:06:18 UTC

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LJ's is still my favorite model!

2024-07-26 20:04:38 UTC

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Ha, thanks! "Goofball" is my only accessible rhetorical mode most of the time.

2024-07-26 19:03:33 UTC

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I think the problem is that we built a connection machine to suit an abstract model of human behavior and it is bad for the kinds of embodied beings we actually are.

2024-07-26 18:40:35 UTC

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I mean sure, reverse chron is an algorithm but my point is that it’s not a specific technical feature that’s to blame for our choice to connect boatloads of people in a giant sloshing pool of amplified inside voices.

2024-07-26 18:19:56 UTC

I feel like the one of the lowest level human internet problems we haven’t solved is how to be around millions of people, many of whom vocally disapprove of at least some of our thoughts and actions, without letting our hyper-social status-sensitive primate brains either melt or devote themselves to arguing that all our positions are the right positions for everyone.
Like yes, some algos are bad, but we also just built structures we can’t quite handle and are perma-mad at each other about it.

2024-07-11 18:45:15 UTC

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I keep thinking about the way “imposter syndrome” pathologizes an often correct intuition (“I don’t belong here”) before it can develop into more threatening extended intuitions like “ahhh none of you belong here either” and “therefore this entire system is a fraud.”

2024-07-11 18:02:42 UTC

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I grew up in a series of fairly extreme religious sects, including one full-blown very dopey cult, and maybe because of that, I failed for the longest time to understand that the same behaviors that drive delusional cult behavior are not just present but pervasive in tech, business, ~politics, and most other sectors of society, including the sciences. It is SO GOOBERY and disappointing.💀

2024-07-11 17:53:18 UTC

Persistently shocked by how much of adult life is dealing with the consequences of other adults determinedly (and obviously!) playing pretend, with terrible consequences.
https://lattice.com/blog/leading-the-way-in-responsible-ai-employment

2024-07-10 22:16:51 UTC

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I almost tagged you into the thread but I didn't want to be weird

2024-07-09 04:11:58 UTC

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Liza do we need to crowdfund you a new AC bc I will kick that off *immediately*

2024-07-04 01:04:24 UTC

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the fucking worst the worst

2024-07-02 21:48:43 UTC

The Marilynne Robinson piece in this week’s NYRB is far from comprehensive but it gets to a lot of things I don’t see much in roughly left-through-liberal discussions of the present situation. (I come from a working class blended family with deployments in every generation and it was one of the things that seemed just totally unintelligible to my peers in college and beyond.)
https://www.nybooks.com/articles/2024/07/18/agreeing-to-our-harm-marilynne-robinson/
(archive.ph has your back if you don’t have library access to nyrb)

2024-07-02 20:53:39 UTC

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SHIELDS UP

2024-07-02 20:51:05 UTC

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YES

2024-07-02 20:48:17 UTC

I made it through a gnarly tree pollen season with a couple weeks of N95s outdoors and many showers but I forgot the way berg few years the grass pollen season roars up here in July and just clotheslines me, lordy 🤧
(I appreciate helpful intent but there is no need to recommend allergy medications/remedies. I am taking them all. Mine, yours, that guy’s. There are no more because I took them all.)

2024-06-28 16:27:28 UTC

I feel like there are very few good long-term guidelines for social media behavior but “try to work through your grief and fear without yelling at people who are working through their own grief and fear in their own way” feels like a solid candidate.

2024-06-20 04:16:28 UTC

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omg

2024-06-20 04:03:36 UTC

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Anyway! I could do without another three days of childishness but the only way to stop it is to delete my posts, and I used to do that regularly but then I realized that actually encourages them so nah.

2024-06-20 04:00:30 UTC

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The most recent one is, I guess, accusing me of sending him unwanted DMs by…replying to him in public?
I guess Mastodon is confusing even to FOSS guys sometimes!

2024-06-20 03:58:35 UTC

Men I don’t know have been yelling at me for about 24 hours about how I am promoting toxicity and misinformation and am a narcissist and a bully in replies to my short thread about how it would be super nice to have control over replies here. To accommodate people who for some reason don’t find people yelling at them to be the highest form of online communication a way to participate in public life online.
Many perfectly reasonable comments agreeing and disagreeing, but like…lordy.

2024-06-19 03:07:46 UTC

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Someone else will say that if you don’t want everyone to be able to say whatever they want in your thread whenever they want to say it, you shouldn’t post in public because that’s the bargain.
But like…I don’t want the old bargain. The old bargain is kind of shit! We have a million ways to contain and shelter even “public” conversations offline, let’s have that in the good online places, too.

2024-06-19 03:02:11 UTC

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Believing you are morally entitled to reply directly to someone because they speak in public is…definitely a position, I guess, but I think being able to specify how you want to be interacted with is deeply humane. (And being able to do it after a thread starts to go sour is so important.)
Someone will ask why blocking doesn’t make this unnecessary and the short answer is that prevention is better than picking off unwanted interactions one by one, and having to process each one as you do it.

2024-06-19 02:56:57 UTC

Bluesky has reply-gating (you can set who can reply to a post, like people you follow or a given list or no one) and is now testing out post-publication reply locking.
I just want to yell for a second about how humane and consent-forward these features are, especially after seeing some people here losing their minds when someone asked for gating recently because they felt (alas, not a paraphrase) entitled to always be able to respond.

2024-06-12 18:13:03 UTC

It's not completely clear to me how various zones of the Fediverse distinguish "scraping" from "non-Mastodon ActivityPub services functioning according to spec in ways I didn't expect."
Given how frequently protocol behaviors act as ethical markers ("if you *can* do it, it's fine") this seems like a fruitful territory to try to map…
(I say this as someone who has myself been surprised more than once by AP implementations that put Fedi posts into unfamiliar-to-me contexts, don't eat me.)

2024-06-07 17:00:45 UTC

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…but without attaching behaviors to names, a story like that Krebs post would be nothing but an unverifiable conspiracy theory.
(If BI had also published his photo, phone number, and home address, that would strike me as an unjustified disclosure of private info and flip this from investigative journalism into doxxing.)

2024-06-07 16:57:31 UTC

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So on the most practical level, if she obscured his name, there would be zero verifiable evidence for her identification. Providing a name means other people can check the work, and potentially build on it.
On the social level, attaching behavior to names is one of the principal ways investigations (journalistic and legal) work because legal identifiers let us trace connections.
Like, I'd argue that this is classic investigative journalism: https://krebsonsecurity.com/2024/05/stark-industries-solutions-an-iron-hammer-in-the-cloud/

2024-06-06 18:04:17 UTC

Welp.
https://www.businessinsider.com/jack-dorsey-fiatjaf-nostr-donation-2024-6
(https://archive.ph/uXdXN#selection-2141.0-2157.353)
https://media.mas.to/media_attachments/files/112/570/990/970/411/577/original/710dcf7bc00fbbdf.png